Bad news for mobile music: "When asked what do they do when they hear a track which they'd like to download to their mobile, only six per cent said they'd buy it from their network operator's portal. A massive 44 per cent said they simply weren't interested in downloading music to their mobile phones."

Given that we've had MP3-playing mobiles for a good few years now (I can't remember the last time I bought a handset which didn't have 64MB of memory and headphones bundled with it), are there any studies about teenagers behaviour with phones and music-playing *today* - i.e. actual evidence that, in the wild, the phone is starting to replace the dedicated MP3 player?

I'm not after an analysis of units shipped of ipods vs handsets - handsets get upgraded quickly, and the purchase of a handset doesn't necessarily indicate that it's being used to listen to music. And I'm not interested in focus-group type studies asking end-users what they'd like to do - but rather actual research into observed behaviour.

Anyone know?

Comments

[nedrichards]

this is not actual research but next time you're in london take the number 18 bus at a time teenagers are likely to be on it (morning or early afternoon). I will say this, they don't use headphones.

[oliverw]

I do a lot of interviews/usability research with the 18 to 34yr demographic here in Australia, and their current usage of mobile phones as musics players is very low. Mainly due to the standard issues of battery life, storage capacity, bad UIs etc.

For all their hype, there is no real competitor to the iPod in terms of ease of use. I have evaluated a number of music phones including Sony Ericssons, Nokias, and Motorolas and you have to have a special headphone adaptor, carry a large/ugly phone or put up with a terrible UI. The funny thing is, putting together a list of requirements isn't that hard and all of the phones have their strengths, but no-one has put it together to make the much touted 'iPod-killer'+phone device.

"A massive 44 per cent said they simply weren't interested in downloading music to their mobile phones."
A fair proportion of the people I talk to are already moving their music from their PC direct to phone, who needs to download over a slow expensive network! I expect this behaviour (to some degree taught by iPod synchronisation) will only increase as the baseline of tech-savy-ness increases.